Mubarak had ruled Egypt for more than 30 years. He simply had to go. All other analysis is merely academic.
If you think America is best served by propping up tyrants like King Abdallah in Saudi Arabia - you are in for a rude shock (in the next few years).
My predictions: The Iranian regime will collapse this decade and the power of militant Islam will be broken. You can take it to the bank.
The questions are: What will take its place? And will America still be relevant in that part of the World?
What is your take on the Libya issue?
If radical Muslims assume power in Egypt it won’t be academic.
um, 5th century BC?
The Empress Farah Diba is still alive, as is the prince of the Pahlevi house. Constitutional monarchy would be an option.
Remember, one reason the Shah fell was that Khomeini's followers were always bitch, bitch, bitching about how cruel and mean the SAVAK agents were to them, and they raised a holy Islamic stink about unjust, non-Islamic rulership. At bottom, it was a big, fat moral complaint.
Now that Iranian society has had a good chance to see what the late Shah's detractors were made of, do you think they might be capable of weighing the old complaints about SAVAK against what the people targeted by SAVAK have done, once their hands were untied?
Maybe the Islamists just flat deserved to get the living snot kicked out of them -- maybe they were just that kind of people who need to be repressed as hard as possible, like LaRouchies, lest they come to power and unleash their pathetically diseased personalities on the rest of humanity.
It would be an interesting thing to let the Iranian people decide on their own.
Did the US have to support a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt? That is clearly what we have done.